Huawei Technologies said on Monday its high-end chips will have transistor density equivalent to 1.4-nanometre processes in five years.
The report indicates that huawei Technologies stated on Monday its high-end chips will have transistor density equivalent to 1.4-nanometre processes in five years, underscoring Beijing’s efforts to neutralise U.S. sanctions that have made it hard for China to build advanced chips.
It further notes that huawei did not provide independent performance data, but the target, unveiled at a semiconductor symposium in Shanghai, is significant because 1.4 nm is expected to be near the global frontier for advanced chipmaking by the end of the decade.
China is widely seen as unlikely to reach that level through conventional manufacturing alone because Washington has restricted its access to advanced lithography tools and other key semiconductor technologies.
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest producer of the most advanced chips, currently uses a 2-nm manufacturing technology and plans to introduce a 1.4-nm process for mass production in 2028.
Huawei unveiled a new principle for improving chips on Monday, noting that the industry can no longer rely mainly on making transistors smaller.
The Tau Scaling Law, as the principle is called, focuses on reducing the time it takes for signals and data to move through chips and computing systems, Huawei said.
If successful, it could offer the company a way to improve performance and chip density despite restrictions on China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor equipment.
The stakes of Huawei’s chip breakthroughs are high, as frontier technologies have become an increasingly important pillar of China’s future economic development and geopolitical leverage.
Huawei’s Ascend chip series has become increasingly central to powering Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek’s latest flagship model V4, released last month.
Huawei stated its Kirin chips, scheduled to launch later this year, would be the first to use a related architecture called LogicFolding, which the company stated would shorten wiring inside chips and considerably improve performance.
It had designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years based on the Tau Scaling Law for use in industries including smartphones and AI computing, the company said.
“What Huawei is proposing is a shift from traditional node-driven scaling to system-level efficiency scaling,” stated He Hui, director of semiconductor research at Omdia.
“Rather than depending solely on smaller transistors, the company is focusing on shortening interconnect, lowering latency and improving data movement inside the chip, which is a credible way to extract more performance when leading-edge lithography is constrained.”
Huawei was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019 that cut it off from many U.S.-origin technologies, including chips and software, and restricted its ability to rely on global contract chipmakers.
